Chapter 75: Promise Kept

The Aleph consults a digital watch, a priceless restored antique that betrays his vanity. Already twenty minutes. Anxiety devours him.

Huan, king of a myriad of worlds trapped in a nebula, impossible to reach by Drift, was a monarch far too demanding for the notorious lack of loyalty he had shown: as soon as the remnants of the dissident fleet had contacted him, he had hastened to sell them to the HS. The Aleph did not appreciate anyone standing against him, but he understood the logic; Huan’s attitude, on the other hand, had no “honor,” a medieval value but one to which those of Garen’s stature, that is to say the aristocracy, clung.

In the height of arrogance, Huan had demanded eternal youth in exchange, but so be it, the pact had been sealed. The Aleph could do many things at a distance, like crush an enemy’s heart, but the delicate operation of eternal youth required his presence in person.

Not wanting to signal to anyone a limit in his powers, he had requested to make a short trip-less than an hour-to the Royal Planet, to honor the Monarch and evaluate him in person. It was a puzzle of Drift and logistics, but the Fleet had found a way.

It was impossible that in an hour, in a day, or even in a month, a famished fleet could take power again on Origin, but as soon as he moved away from the nerve center and from the human worlds he personally held through the Entangled Gates, an anxiety rose in him. An anxiety whose true reason he repressed: because you were not much, and you became powerful, other not-muches could follow your path and take your place. But this weak-spirited thought filled him with shame, put him into a self-destructive rage difficult to contain. So he contented himself with hating Huan.

Twenty minutes, and he rises, levitating his own body, up the Acropolis where the King is, while his escort follows him running up the stairs. He lands like an angel before Huan and his assembly of sickly, weak servants from a life far from the sophisticated care of the HS, surrounded by stolen Chimera Protea and a few dark warriors armed with blades.

A band of peasants, in sum, who had dared demand that a God come to visit them. He read abject fear, deeply rooted, in the servants and high officials. A fear even greater than the one he himself inspired. A scandal. He read absolute loyalty in the guards, a loyalty even greater than the most zealous of his adjutants. A scandal.

King Huan, a shriveled, weak human creature, kept alive by fierce hatred and experimental equipment, made a vague hand gesture.

- “Aleph, sovereign of the HS, I have kept my word.”

Placing his feet on the ground, the Aleph, well-built, towered over them all. He said nothing, simply extended his hand like a mage of ancient times. He plunged into the dying biology of the King ... isolated, for each limb, each organ, healthy and vigorous cells, then destroyed and rebuilt all the others from these matrices-while preserving the information they processed, as with neurons. Then, in each of these cells, he modified the chemistry of the stem cell walls so that at every mitosis division would occur without any loss of information-the key, no more and no less, to eternal life. He increased Huan’s muscle mass through division and generated enough fat for his body to sustain this transformation, drawing it from the quantum void and stabilizing it.